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Determining Regional Gradient

My biggest project examines positive interactions along a regional gradient of continentality. The immediate question though is what is continentality? What abiotic and biotic variables change along this gradient in addition to plant-plant interactions. When we initially constructed this gradient the two main considerations were aridity and cold stress. For plants in the Deserts of California these are two very important considerations. After two years of conducting this experiment, I had very different climate profiles during the seasons. The most striking was the differences in my plant phytometers between the two seasons. In 2015-2016 growing season, the majority of my plants were present in the San Joaquin Desert. This desert is generally colder and wetter than the more continental Mojave Desert to the east. However, in the 2016-2017 the San Joaquin Desert sites had few plants of my chosen phytometer relative to the abundant Mojave Desert sites. All my plants were present at all my sites at some point, suggesting that this gradient shifts with inter-annual variability. Let’s take a look at what some of that looks like:

San Joaquin Desert year

The 2015-2016 shown in black had similar temperatures on average relative to the 2016-2017 growing season (in grey). The precipitation patterns though were different between years. These sites form a parabola with distances from the ocean. Sites closest to the ocean and most inland have the highest precipitation, while sites in the middle are the least. Overall the 2016-2017 season saw significantly more rainfall. Sites in the 2015-2016 season were extremely arid. For instance, Barstow and my site along Hwy40 saw as little as 30 mm of rainfall. The low abundance of my phytometer in the Mojave sites for that season is therefore likely because of low rainfall amounts. However, the San Joaquin sites has similar rainfall between years so then why so few plants in the 2016-2017. I believe this has to do with the cold stress factor:

Precipitation in mm (black) and temperature in C° (red) during the 2015-2016 growing season for the San Joaquin desert (top) and Mojave Desert (bottom).

Precipitation in mm (black) and temperature in C° (red) during the 2016-2017 growing season for the San Joaquin desert (top) and Mojave Desert (bottom).

Mojave Desert year

Both of these seasons had similar precipitation and temperature patterns. The patterns were also similar between the two deserts, but the noticeable difference that I believe contributed to low plant abundance in the San Joaquin in 2016-2017 is temperature. The year before had warmer temperatures from January onward, which is a key period for plant development. In January 2017 following the majority of rainfall there was a long freeze period of approximately 5 days, followed by another cold period with freezing temperatures end of February. This pattern was much warmer in 2016 and is why I believe cold stress negatively affected plants in San Joaquin Desert for 2017. On the other hand, the Mojave saw significantly ore precipitation and cooler temperatures that all contributed to greater plant abundance.

Slicing through this climate data was interesting and challenging because of all the different ways to summarize variables. Using season means collapses a significant amount of the information and can make conclusions more difficult to derive. I am primed and excited now to dig into the plant responses!